Carle Jasmin (Image: AI-generated to protect Michelet’s identity / Gay Globe)

We all love our city, no matter what city we live in or what country we live in, and we want our city to be appreciated as much as possible and its reputation to be positive. All major cities have challenges to deal with: Montreal and its social crises, Paris and its uncleanliness, or San Francisco, once the diamond of California, now turned into a human dump whose situation the state is unable to manage.

This week, I witnessed something I never thought I would see, and I realized, through the testimony of Michelet, an 18-year-old gay Frenchman from Cannes who came with a two-year working holiday visa, that Montreal had become a factory producing the downfall caused by drugs. Montreal has become a machine for creating drug addicts who, even if they arrive from elsewhere healthy and full of dreams, end up on the streets, in makeshift encampments, and who can no longer even leave the city because they are so dependent on street drugs that they were not even using when they arrived and they no longer have a penny to leave.

Let me tell you Michelet’s story.

Michelet was 17 when he decided, with his parents’ permission, to set off on an adventure to Canada, his head filled with magnificent landscapes, wide-open spaces and postcard images. Like many young Europeans who dream of discovering North America, he imagined a welcoming, safe, open-minded country, sufficiently vast to offer him an experience he would never forget.

He wanted to take a break from his studies, get away from his daily routine and come fill his head and heart with a different experience. Thanks to a Canadian visa allowing young foreigners to stay in Canada, travel and work there, he would be able to experience genuine immersion in a country of many cultures, shaped by the history of its two founding nations, French and British.

At 17, Michelet was not coming to Canada to escape anything. He was coming to discover. To work, travel, meet people, learn and build a life experience. He arrived with the enthusiasm and naivety of his age, with plans and dreams, but above all with the confidence one naturally gives to a country one has only known through the images seen of it.

And then there was Montreal.

The city he was about to discover was not exactly the one he had imagined. Far from the postcards, the wide-open spaces and the image of a prosperous and welcoming Canada, he would gradually be confronted with a much darker reality, one he had absolutely not anticipated.

What was supposed to be a two-year adventure was going to take a direction Michelet could never have imagined at 18, when he arrived in Montreal.

Obviously, with the freshness and enthusiasm of his 18 years, Michelet quickly found a job in the Gay Village, then a roommate and a rather simple apartment, but one that was already highly sought after in the Canadian metropolis in these times.

The first few months were wonderful. Almost unreal. Everything was new to him: the food, the cars, the habits, the pace of daily life, Quebec expressions and that very particular way Montrealers have of living their city. Every day brought a new set of discoveries.

But there was one thing above all that continued to amaze him: people spoke French there.

Michelet knew that there was a French-speaking community in Canada, but he could not quite grasp that a country so immense, sitting just north of the United States, could keep the French language alive across a territory stretching almost from one ocean to the other. And Montreal, only a few dozen minutes from the American border, seemed to him like a wonderful little anomaly in the middle of North America.

For a young Frenchman arriving from Cannes with his dreams, his points of reference and his images of Canada, Montreal had something magical about it.

He had found a job, an apartment, friends and a city that opened its arms to him. He was 18 and, for the time being, everything seemed to be going his way. Little did he know that this beautiful adventure was soon going to take on a completely different face.

And because he worked and lived in the heart of a district where the partying never seemed to stop, Michelet had quickly developed a strange habit: working during the day or evening, then meeting up with his friends as soon as his shift was over and going out until the early hours of the morning. At 18, you believe your body is inexhaustible. You can dance all night, sleep a few hours and start again the next day as if nothing had happened. But even at 18, the body eventually sends you the bill.

For Michelet, fatigue first settled in quietly. Then it became increasingly heavy. He began missing workdays, unable to get out of bed at 3 p.m. to be at work at 4 p.m. His lifestyle was gradually slipping out of his control. It was at that point that a friend offered him a few energy pills, assuring him that they would allow him to continue partying while giving him enough energy to work a few hours later.

Michelet did not know what he was taking. He knew neither the composition of the pills nor their actual origin. But they were easy to find. In Montreal’s Gay Village, substances circulated with disconcerting ease, almost as if they were part of the scenery. A veritable open-air chemical pharmacy, under the eyes of authorities who seemed overwhelmed by the scale of the phenomenon.

The pills quickly began to change Michelet. He was losing weight. They kept him awake and stimulated, but they also killed his appetite. The nights became longer, the mornings more difficult. Alcohol, pills, parties, festive nights and exhausting work now formed a mixture that left him virtually no respite.

His body began telling the story of what he himself may still have refused to see. Dark circles appeared under his eyes. His general hygiene deteriorated. He had less energy, less money and less and less control over his daily life.

Then the consequences became very concrete. He began missing rent payments. His income decreased as his absences multiplied. Each problem led to another, and every attempt to regain control seemed to bring him back to the same point.

After only nine months in the Canadian metropolis, Michelet no longer really felt as though he were living his new life. His life now revolved around drugs. He had entered a vicious circle from which he no longer knew how to escape, even though only a few months earlier Montreal had still seemed to him like the beginning of a new existence.

As soon as I managed to get myself out of bed, my first concern was to calm my muscle pain and the anxiety that was becoming stronger and stronger because of the daily withdrawal. I didn’t even look at myself in the mirror before going out into the street to look for pills. I was too afraid to see my face. I knew I had changed and it really scared me. I felt that I would never have the strength to stop this stupid cycle of dependence. I no longer knew how to get out of it. And I could not even imagine going back to France in that state. My parents and friends would have been horrified. They would have wondered what had happened to me. They might have thought I was coming back from Kabul or something! recounts Michelet, discouraged, whom I had met on a pink bench in the Village in mid-September while he was waiting for his “pharmacist.”

A few days later, Michelet did not go to work. This time, he did not even have an excuse. He had simply slept. A heavy, deep, almost comatose sleep after several nights spent trying to push back his fatigue with pills. When he finally opened his eyes, daylight was already coming through the curtains. He looked at the time on his phone.

His shift had ended long before. Several missed calls from his employer appeared on the screen. He remained sitting on his bed without moving. He knew. He knew exactly what was going to happen. For a few minutes, he considered calling back and making up a story. An illness. A medical problem. Anything. But even he no longer believed his own excuses.

When he finally called, the conversation was short. His employer had had enough. Michelet had just lost his job.

At 18, he suddenly found himself without a salary, with rent overdue and a drug habit that was not slowing down. For the first time, he could no longer tell himself that he simply needed to manage his time better or sleep more. He no longer had a job.

And he still needed pills.

Money was beginning to run seriously short. He postponed certain payments, borrowed from friends, sold a few belongings and found all kinds of temporary solutions to keep paying what needed to be paid. But every solution merely postponed the problem by a few days.

One evening, as he counted the money he had left, Michelet realized that he could no longer pay his next rent. He counted it again. The result did not change. He was short of money. He had nothing left, and there was no question of asking his parents to cover him. He knew the money would end up being spent on pills and he did not want his situation to become known.

His roommate, for his part, did not bother with formalities. After the second missed rent payment and after learning that Michelet had lost his job, he politely escorted him to the door, telling him to take his belongings and never come back.

Michelet’s visa is still valid for another year. But his situation had become so precarious that he tried to obtain help from the Consulate General of France in Montreal. The only possibility offered to him was repatriation financed in the form of a loan, an amount he might eventually have had to repay. He no longer knew what to do. But returning to France in that condition had become unthinkable for him. His pride, perhaps as much as his shame, prevented him from doing so.

A few months earlier, Montreal represented a golden opportunity for him. At 18, he had arrived with the energy, dreams and plans of a young man who believed he was beginning a new life. He was supposed to discover a new city, work, meet people and one day return to France with memories he would talk about for years.

Today, he has no job, no home and practically nothing left to hold on to. The metropolis now has one more homeless person dependent on street drugs.

Michelet lives with two other homeless people in a run-down tent, in the middle of a makeshift encampment near Pie-IX Street, in southeastern Montreal. Not eligible for social assistance, he searches through garbage bins to try to survive. At 18!

I ran into Michelet by chance a few days after our initial meeting and conversation. Sitting on a pink bench in the Village, Michelet was talking to himself. I approached him and, for a few seconds, I had difficulty recognizing the young man I had met a few days earlier. His face had changed. His body had changed. So had the way he behaved. The transformation had been sudden.

The city had entered his body. He quickly greeted me, then looked away. He did not want to talk. I did not insist.

There is something particularly brutal about Michelet’s story. He did not come to Montreal to become a drug addict. He did not come to live in a tent. He did not leave France at 18 to end up searching through garbage bins.

He came looking for a life. His story is that of a human tragedy, but also of a young man who found himself caught up in an environment whose risks he did not understand. What was supposed to be an open door to the future became a trap from which he still does not know how to escape. Michelet is still in Montreal.

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